IDC Names 2011 Innovative Business Analytics Companies Under $100M to Watch As Vendors Work to Differentiate and Harness the Ability to Unify Content and Data

FRAMINGHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--In an effort to acknowledge business analytics vendors with revenues of less than $100 million who are adapting and innovating around key trends in the business analytics market, International Data Corporation (IDC) has published a new report highlighting a set of "Innovative Business Analytics Companies Under $100M to Watch" for 2011.

“New technologies are eliminating boundaries between content and data to enable pervasive access to all relevant information. Contributing to this innovation is a group of small companies with the vision and technology to have an impact on the IT marketplace”

To identify the 2011 Innovative Business Analytics Companies Under $100M to Watch, IDC solicited entries from vendors with annual revenues of less than $100 million who exemplified one or more of three key trends in applications today. These trends are:

• Collaborative Decision Management: Analytic software tools and features enable documentation of decision processes, provide contextual collaboration, and improve not only information sharing but the sharing of experience that supplemented the data to inform a decision.
• Cloud-based Analytics: Analytic applications or business intelligence tools accessed through a public cloud that demonstrate ease of acquisition, deployment, and use or other differentiating features relative to traditional on-premise software deployments.
• Mobile Analytics: Mobile access to analytics via dashboards or analytic components deployed on mobile devices is gaining visibility as software vendors increase the availability of such tools. Mobile analytics can guide decisions within the context of a business process among a mobile workforce who can benefit from jobs specific decision support based on analytics.

Companies were judged on these criteria as a measure of their driving innovation in business analytics. The companies selected in this category for 2011 are (in alphabetical order):

• Carrier IQ
• FirstRain
• Glassbeam
• Infegy
• Q-Sensei
• River Logic

"New technologies are eliminating boundaries between content and data to enable pervasive access to all relevant information. Contributing to this innovation is a group of small companies with the vision and technology to have an impact on the IT marketplace," says Henry Morris, senior vice president, Worldwide Software and Services Research at IDC.

The IDC study, Innovative Business Analytics Companies Under $100 Million to Watch, 2011 (IDC #230923), profiles each of the selected companies based on their exemplification of one or more of the identified trends. These criteria were selected from IDC's Worldwide Information Access, Analysis, and Management Software 2011 Top 10 Predictions (IDC #226654).

IDC's "Innovative Companies Under $100M to Watch" reports are a qualitative evaluation of a set of vendors within a specific market – they are not a stack ranking nor do they represent an exhaustive evaluation of all companies in a segment or a comparative ranking of the companies in the report. IDC solicited entries from vendors of less than $100 million that exemplify specific key trends and respondents were asked to submit case studies that represented one of the three business analytics trends that were used as the basis for this year's award. These case studies were evaluated individually and independently by analysts across several predetermined criteria. The teams then met to review the scores that had been collected for the competing vendors. When significant differences in analyst opinion were discovered, the analysts debated the reasoning behind their scoring with an IDC vice president acting as moderator until a final list was chosen.

About IDC

IDC is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community to make fact-based decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,000 IDC analysts provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 100 countries. For more than 47 years, IDC has provided strategic insights to help our clients achieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world's leading technology media, research, and events company. You can learn more about IDC by visiting www.idc.com.

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